Jonny Steinberg

Crime prevention goes abroad: Policy transfer and policing in post-apartheid South Africa:

Loader and Walker have warned that ideas about order ‘always travel with culturally specific baggage’, ‘never adapt easily to [their] new environment’ and thus ‘always risk hubristic failure’. My aim is to offer an exemplar of this hubristic failure. I chart the infusion of Anglo-American ideas of crime prevention into the policing institutions of South Africa’s young democracy. These ideas bore a bloated conception of urban security which inadvertently stimulated, and thus helped to keep alive, a similarly bloated conception of security that lay at the heart of apartheid thinking. Dressed in the garb of crime prevention, a modified version of the paramilitary policing practices that flourished under apartheid returned to the streets of democratic South Africa.

Working through a Paradox about Sexual Culture in South Africa: Tough Sex in the Twenty-First Century

South African sexual culture appears to embody a paradox. Sex, and the comfortable fact that everyone is having it, pervades the surface of South African life. Yet South Africa is also a country where the stigma associated with being HIV-positive is notoriously unforgiving. Breezy licentiousness and dark opprobrium appear to live at close quarters. Recent scholarship has been stumped by this paradox; most scholars attempt to deal with it by dissolving one pole of the paradox, arguing that HIV stigma in fact has nothing to do with sexual shame. I argue here that easy public talk about sex and deep sexual shame do indeed inhabit the same sexual culture and are in fact symptoms of the same syndrome. In a context of chronic unemployment, where paths to adulthood have been delinked from work, the sex lives of young adults have been infantilised. Incessant public talk about sex is a manifestation of this infantilisation for it is a sign of the diminishment of the dignity of the sex lives of those who live in the aftermath of South Africas ‘patriarchal bargain’.

Introduction: From Comrades to Citizens

‘David and Goliath’ stories speak to that corner of our collective imagination which entertains humanity’s loftiest and proudest images of itself: the victory of honesty over deceit, of rationality over the dark and the archaic, of the sheer will to freedom over the might of arms. In today’s world, such stories are intrinsically seductive because they nourish modernity’s most sanguine and benign images of its own adventure, the idea that our story is one in which the oppressed and the downtrodden will inevitably find their rightful place at the summit of political power, no matter how bleak the odds.

Establishing police authority and civilian compliance in post-apartheid Johannesburg: an argument from the work of Egon Bittner

Egon Bittners seminal insight is that a precondition of democratic policing is a demand for it among the general population. What happens when that demand is absent? What happens, in other words, when the general population withdraws its consent to being policed? I explore this question in the context of post-apartheid Johannesburg, where compliance with police authority is patchy. I argue that there is a strong relationship between non-compliance and the density of public space, that patrols are animated by the avoidance of human density, and that when police cannot avoid density, the nature of police–civilian engagement is shaped by a sophisticated filigree of rules established by civilians. I ask why civilian compliance in contemporary Johannesburg is so patchy and find answers both in aspects of the citys apartheid history and in several policy errors made by South Africas former liberation movement when it came to power in 1994. Looking beyond South Africa, I argue that in any urban context characterised by meagre security and endemic disorder the police ought to establish its authority by confining itself to two functions: effectively investigating violent crime and providing rapid and fair interventions whenever citizens call for help in emergencies. In South Africa and elsewhere, recent trends in police policy, inspired by professional criminology, have steered police in other directions.

A Place for Civics in a Liberal Democratic Polity? The Fate of Local Institutions of Resistance after Apartheid

As the constitutional transition in South Africa moved to a close, the radical urban civics that arose in the 1980s to destroy apartheid found themselves in a central but precarious position.1 The anomalies entailed in ending a racial dictatorship have stamped a peculiar identity onto these residents’ associations. Unelected by testable procedures, and with only rudimentary mechanisms of consultation, civics entered the trans- itionary process as ‘the sole and legitimate representatives of the community’. Until the ballots of all-inclusive local and metropolitan elections were counted after elections in November 1995 and May and June 1996, community organizations shared the running of the trans-itionary government with the apartheid functionaries which they sought to destroy.2 (For a discussion of the impact of local government elections on civics, see Chapter 7 by Seekings in this collection)

South Africa in Transition – Introduction

In their editorial introduction to the special edition of JSAS commemorating a decade of democracy in South Africa (JSAS, 31, 4 [2005]), Beall, Gelb and Hassim use the phrase ‘fragile stability’ to describe the state of the post-apartheid order. Reading further, it would be fair to say that they invest more faith in the ‘stability’ side of this duo than in the ‘fragile’ side. While they signal that ‘immense social problems ... remain a threat to social order’, they none the less diagnose the foundations of South Africa’s democratic order to be fairly secure. ‘The non-racial regime is fully accepted as legitimate’, they write. Moreover, ‘state authority and capacity have been regenerated from a position of severe weakness at the time of the transition to a situation today where it has substantial capabilities in exercising basic functions such as policing, border control and taxation’ (p. 681). They thus conclude that ‘fragile stability ... represents an “equilibrium” that is likely to persist in the shortto medium-term’ (p. 681); that the country’s acute social problems are unlikely to threaten the political order any time soon. A decade on, the political order remains standing, but the pressures it faces are significantly more acute. Since that anniversary edition of JSAS, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been roiled by a succession of internal ructions. In December 2007, the party unseated its president, Thabo Mbeki, at its national conference in Polokwane, and forced him to step down as president of South Africa the following year. Behind this palace coup were signs that the deep social problems of which Beall et al. spoke were finding expression in the heart of the political establishment. Indeed, the ousting of Mbeki was just the first sign of acute strain. The ANC’s trade union movement ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), has split, signalling an end to the social consensus through which the ANC has hitherto governed. Twice, major figures in the ANC have formed breakaway parties: first the Congress of the People (COPE), made up primarily of disgruntled Mbeki-ites who had been ousted at Polokwane; later the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, now the third-largest party in parliament and principal opposition in two provincial legislatures. There is an increasing sense in South Africa that the settlement reached in 1994 was not so much the foundation of a new order as a holding operation, keeping in abeyance a host of unresolved issues in regard to economic distribution and race relations. Concealed beneath the ANC’s continued electoral dominance is a diminution of its authority and, indeed, of the authority of a host of the new order’s institutions. In April 2014, academics from across Europe, North America and South Africa came together at the University of Oxford to probe the nature of the South African settlement 20 years on from its founding election. This part special issue represents a snippet of the analyses that emerged from this conference, occurring on the eve of South Africa’s fifth national democratic contest. Twenty years – a generation – is sufficient time to begin to get a sense of the longue durée. How successfully have democratic institutions been able to shift long-standing structural features in society? How have the aspirations of those who fought for liberation and equality fared relative to those of the 40 per cent of the population born since 1994, who have no experience of minority rule?